Partner Portal: Airline Booking Panel Coverage

Introduction

Airline Booking Panel Coverage is the metric that we utilise to measure how often airline quotes are being offered to travellers in our site.

Improving your coverage is a fundamental and essential way to increase your redirects and increase the travellers’ ability to book directly through your website.

How is Airline Booking Panel Coverage measured?

We measure coverage at booking panel (BP) level, which is the screen presenting the list of partners offering the itinerary. Please find an example BP below:

Airline Booking Panel Coverage will be a rate between 0%-100%, where 100% is the optimal value. The way it is calculated is:

This measure is key, as including the airline’s option within the results promotes traveler trust and conversion.

We also measure the opportunity in terms of coverage by using the Coverage Gap metric. This is 100% - Airline Booking Panel Coverage. In the example above, Coverage Gap would be 100% - 90% = 10%.

The Coverage Gap presents number of instances in which an airline offers an itinerary or operates a route but does not provide it in the API result, while OTAs provide results.

We will strongly support our airline partners to improve their Coverage Gap to make sure they are set up for success.

What does healthy coverage look like?

We consider healthy coverage anything above 90%. If your Coverage is below 90% (or in other words, if your Coverage Gap is higher than 10%), we strongly recommend to review the metrics we provide via Airline Booking Panel Coverage Module.

What is a coverage issue?

A coverage issue is an instance in which for diverse reasons your quote is not being shown to travellers. Below is an example of a successful quote retrieval. No coverage issue will be recorded in this case, but a successful BP instead.

On the contrary, below is an example of when problems occur to retrieve the airline quote:

As per the above image, only OTAs selling the itinerary will be displayed to travellers. This has been proven to reduce chances of redirects for all partner types. Also, this will be recorded as 1 faulty BP.

What are the issues contributing to my Coverage Gap?

The Coverage Gap root causes can be very different. To support your investigation, the tool provides information around Category and Sub-category.

The different Categories we have designated to help you locate Coverage issues in your integration are:

Search restrictions

We do not call your API due to some configuration restrictions, which may be place due to different reasons:

• Legacy configuration: e.g. queries for +6 pax were not supported previously, that eventually changed but settings were never updated.
• Tailored restrictions: e.g. you have at some point in time requested us not to call your API for domestic content.
• Restrictions set after technical limitations: e.g your API does not return codeshare itineraries and therefore these have never been enabled at our side.

API issues

We call your API for the itinerary you are offering. However, we do not get a valid response. This normally has to do with the quality and richness of your API content.

 

Unreproducible

One or more OTAs previously returned the itinerary but that is not the case anymore. In many cases this is linked to your API response stability.

Categories encompass several Sub-categories. Please note that full description and improvement guidelines for each of them can be found in the Coverage Breakdown Report tab from the tool.

 

How can I best make use of the Coverage Module?

We suggest the below actions in order to investigate Coverage issues successfully.

1. Access the Airline Booking Panel Coverage module, which is available for all our airline Partners. Take some time to familiarise yourself with the main root causes for your Coverage Gap.
2. Once you are comfortable with the naming convention, make use of the filters at the left which allow to focus on the specifics you will to investigate.
3. After selecting the desired filters, head to the Breakdown Report and take a look into the specific itineraries that have been recorded as not being displayed. There is an URL provided per issue to reproduce the case.
4. Use these to investigate and try to find patterns which can shed light on the issue which needs to be fixed.